After a hellish layover, you are really looking forward to cramming your ass into a Delta economy seat for six plus hours. You’ve been up since 4 AM local time, and want nothing more than to eat your meagerly portioned vegetarian lasagna in peace.
You trudge down the aisle towards your seat: 34G. It’s the window, which you like, since you can watch the patchwork of farms and suburbs shrink as you leave and grow as you arrive. You can also rest your head against the bulkhead in hopes of pulling down some much needed unconsciousness.
But sitting in your seat is another. She looks like a skeleton who got into a Maybelline factory and just went nuts. Her eyes are huge and wild, never blinking, and her overly sticked lips are cracked and dry.
“Hi, I’m 34G.”
“OK. Guess that means we’re together.” She makes direct eye contact with you. You know this is going to be bad.
She seems completely content with staying in your seat, so you take the aisle instead. It’s not ideal, but best not to start the flight with some petty drama over a seat. As you sit down and remove your coat, bending down to shove it uncerimonious underneath the seat in front of you, you notice the smell. Cheap au de toilette and the unmistakable smell of aloe vera and lidocaine.
Before you’ve even taken off your hat, she asks what you do for a living.
“I’m a writer.” You try to keep the conversation terse, as you’re exhausted and not feeling particularly chatty.
“I am a scientist.” Her voice is harpy-like, tainted by the cringe inducing elements of a thick, Minnesota accent.
“OK.” You look down, fumbling for something to serve as a distraction.
She proceeds to tell you that not only is she a scientist, but she is a bionanotechnologist. You nod. Her eyes flash with eccentricity bordering on full blown insanity. She explains that she is working on something that will “literally change the face of science” but no one respects her findings because she’s a woman. She tells you for the first of about thirty times during the flight that she is fifty-two years old.
She promises to show you her data via a PowerPoint after she’s gone to the bathroom. You politely decline, but she demands you see, as it is apparently very important. As she gets up, you notice her outfit for the first time; a saggy white tank top with the word “Cardio” in bright pink, written in stylized characters. Her ill-fitted yoga pants match.
The woman across the aisle shoots you a sympathetic look. You look around in a panic for a free seat, but this appears to be a full flight. You’re stuck next to the nanobiotecnolometerologist for the next six hours, and there ain’t shit you can do about it.
When she returns, she doesn’t give you a chance to stand up, and instead awkwardly squeezes by you, forcing your laptop up into your face. She sits down and rummages in her bag, pulling out dozens upon dozens of tiny bottles, all filled with unidentified liquids. You are pretty sure she shouldn’t have gotten through security with all of that, but you say nothing.
She proceeds to slather green aloe vera gel all over her shoulders. Before you can ask, she leans in closer than appropriate and proceeds to show you the soft tissue sarcoma that has blown a crater into her shoulder. She is applying the aloe vera to combat the targeted radiation she had that morning and tells you that it is like the worst sunburn you can imagine. You pray for deliverance or death, whichever comes first.
She doesn’t stop talking. After she orders her first glass of pinot grigo, she starts swearing profusely, claiming that, “we’re all fucked” and “don’t even know that we’re fucked.” She also manages to casually slip in several blanket racial slurs, mainly directed at the “dirty” Russians and the “scheming” Chinese.
By now, she has pulled out her MacBook; a filthy thing with more specs of crap on the screen than you’ve ever seen. She has sticky notes stuck on either side of her touchpad; the are penned in some arcane language, or at least by someone who doesn’t understand how to communicate with other humans.
As she goes through slide after slide after slide after slide, of images of metastasised mouse tumors, she points out how her sub 50 nanometer biocapsule is the solution to every problem in the world, including cancer, heart disease, and somehow, Downs Syndrome. She gets to a slide with human test samples, which she not-so-subtly mentions came from her living tissue. She also let’s you know in disgusting detail how she has injected herself with her own, unproven, untested nanocapsules, and that, “they totally worked.”
The technology she is describing is actually sort of fascinating, so you start to write it down in your notebook. You’re thinking, “maybe I can get a bitchin’ SciFi story out of this torment.” She eyes your journal suspiciously and asks if you’ve ever been to Iran. You say no and stare at her blankly. In the dim cabin of the C767-300ER, her crumpled, thin hair makes her look like an extra from Hellraiser.
When the horrific nightmare that is the sub-50 nanocapsule presentation is over, she finally asks why you’re travelling. You explain that you are on your way to meet your wife for an adventure in Ireland. An Emerald Isle Honeymoon, if she will. She won’t. She tells you she is going to meet her younger sister, if the plane doesn’t crash into the middle of the Atlantic while we’re all asleep.
With no conversational transition, she tells you how her marriage has been destroyed because she’s going to be dead in a few years, and how it is important that you and your significant other “test” your relationship by going through some physical hardship. I bite my tongue to keep from suggesting that perhaps her unbridled maniacal monomania might possibly kind of sorta have something to do with her problems.
You’ve tried everything at this point to politely get her to shut the fuck up. When you pull out your Nintendo DS to appear otherwise occupied, she tells you that she is old enough to be your mother, and that video games are “a fucking waste of time.” She tries to read to you from her “Hinduism for Dummies” book. You can’t decide which would be easier: killing her or killing yourself.
The next three hours are like a fever dream; she mentions that she is an incest survivor (you can only guess what that means, and that guess is terrifying), slaps you on the thigh with her emaciated arm at one point after she tells a joke, and explains how she shouldn’t really be running a $100,000 chemistry lab in her basement and injecting her cats with experimental drugs, but the EPA doesn’t give a big enough shit to do anything about it.
Every time you try to fall asleep, she leans in and says something completely asinine like, “think we’re still over the water?”
When skeletor asks you what all those green things lining the outsides of the farms are, use one or two word responses, and feign (or just give into) exhaustion. Keep responding to keep her looking out the window.
“Trees.”
“Soccer field.”
“Rocks.”
“Runway.”
When the plane finally lands, grab your things, and start talking to the couple behind you. Doesn’t matter what you talk about, just talk.
Bolt for customs. Prey some unnatural evil doesn’t give her strength. Clear customs, escape into the wilds of Ireland, bereft of sanity, haunted by the smell of Banana Boat after burn lotion and poorly applied lipstick.
Tagged: flight, forced powerpoint presentation, humor, science!, stuck next to mephistopheles, survival, travel
Fantastic piece: witty, funny, and best of all excruciatingly true. This is my first time to your blog, but after the first few paragraphs I already knew I was a fan of your writing. Look forward to reading more!
Thanks! Hope you enjoy some of my other posts.
Hahaha! This is hilarious! But I’m so sorry for you that you have to endure that.
Hey, at least this blog post was born from my misery.
You’re too nice. Next time bring an eye pillow. I know, it will probably compromise your masculinity, but plugging in the earphones, cranking the seat back the 2 1/2 millimeters to the extent of its capabilities, and slapping on an eye pillow works EVERY TIME!
I am too nice. I could have easily just ignored her, or told her to STFU, but I just couldn’t. I’m a sucker, I know.
This was hilarious, just wanted I needed to wake up with a laugh today. You are clearly a very patient person! But hell, when stuff like this happens, at least you know you’ll have something to write about. 🙂
I like to think I’m a patient person. Maybe to a fault some times. The entire time I was taking notes, just because I knew I had to write about this experience. Shit like this happens for a reason, if that reason is only to entertain some people.
Holy shit Oliver. I am sorry for your misery. I’ve had some bad ‘plane pals’ but this lady takes the cake. I guess it just goes to proving the old adage though – No pain, no gain. Without her, you couldn’t have entertained the rest of us with your regaling.
Prior to this, the worst “plane partner” I ever had was an incredibly smelly Brazillian dude who snored louder than the volume on my MP3 player would go. This woman made me dream of being stuck next to a sweaty neckbeard whose only form of communication was labored wheezing.
I hope there’s enough beer in Ireland….and that’s probably the first time that’s been said seriously…..
Many, many beers were had.
Take an mp3 player and listen to audio books. Those take hours to listen to and you won’t hear a word she says.
This was the kind of woman who would have either 1) kept talking louder and louder or 2) pulled the headphones out/off of your head so you would listen to her. Hell incarnate.
Noise-cancelling headphones. ‘Nuff said
See the above comment. Also, I may have sort of kind of broken my Bose headphones at my last StarCraft 2 party.
Tragic!
Pillow over the face. Or try Connie T’s idea.
Pillow over her face? I’ll try that next time.
One of my favorites Oliver! You’re definitely too nice….that’s why fate punishes you the way it does.
Zack
Thanks for commenting Zack. And yes, I think the general consensus is that I need to grow a pair.
Save up and travel club class.
Maybe in a few years when I have a little more disposable income. Until then, I’m stuck in the back with the crazies.
OH GOD WHY WON’T THEY JUST LET US SLEEP!
great and disturbing post.
Thanks! Sleep was all I really wanted.
I’d just done crying with laughter at your post when I caught a glimpse of your tag “forced PowerPoint presentation”. The tears are back.
I try to include random tags, so I’m glad someone noticed 🙂
Captivating relay of your hellacious plane ride. I felt like I was on that plane with you. Yikes!
Glad it was so convincing! I was truly awful, but at least we got some laughs out of it.
Shudder…..
Yea, I think I physically shuddered at least twice on the flight.
You had to have fictionalized that a bit. I mean, it couldn’t have been that bad, could it? Could it? (Tell me you made it up so I won’t have nightmares.)
As per our earlier conversation: Nope. All true. Not sure even my messed up brain could have created such a monster.
I was actually thinking about the same thing! But I’d love to know the scenarios of murder that must have gone through your head all those time. That’s what I’d probably do. =)
I’m not a violent person at all, but I admit that I thought it might be best to just knock her unconscious really quickly without making much of a scene, just to get some sleep.